DISCOVERY 



161 



The Queen in Hamlet (Act III, Sc. 4) says, as the Ghost 



disappears — 



" This is the very coinage of your brain ; 

 This bodiless creation ecstasy 

 Is very cunning in." 



In modern language this is a visual hallucination. 



The hackneyed words of Cassio in Othello, " O that 

 men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away 

 their brains," is one more Shakespearean recognition 

 of the brain as the seat of the reason. 



In Anthonv and Cleopatra there is another remarkable 

 passage apropos of this subject, where Anthony says 

 (.Act IV, Sc. 8) : 



" Yet have we a brain that nourishes our nerves." 



We dare not read into this line all that is invoh-ed in 

 our modern doctrine of the nerv-e-cells in the brain 

 being the highest trophic realm for the nerve-cells 

 lower down which in turn give rise to the nerves them- 

 selves. If, however, it does not mean this, it does 

 not seem to mean anything : it appears to embody 

 some profound truth. 



Possibly one of the most remarkable of all the pas- 

 sages of biological significance in Shakespeare is in 

 Love's Labour's Lost, where Holofernes, speaking of 

 ideas, says : 



"These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in 

 the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of 

 occasion." 



Holofernes is a schoolmaster, and therefore presum- 

 ably represents a learned man, and certainly here his 

 allusions are sufficiently erudite to puzzle a good many 

 fairly well educated people. 



The " ventricle of memory " is a phrase borrowed 

 from the Arabian doctors of medicine, who held that the 

 brain possessed three cavities or ventricles in which 

 the three subdivisions of the chief soul resided. The 

 anterior was related to sensations, the middle to imagin- 

 ation, the posterior to memory. (Modern anatomists 

 describe five cerebral ventricles.) These views were 

 adopted by the theological Doctors of the Church in 

 the Middle Ages. They were one of the beliefs against 

 which Andreas Vesalius, the father of anatomy, par- 

 ticularly inveighed in his celebrated treatise, De 

 Corporis Huniani Fabrica, published in 1543. In deal- 

 ing with the brain he wrote : " I wonder at what I read 

 in the scholastic theologians and the lay philosophers 

 concerning the three ventricles with which they say 

 the brain is supplied." " He then," says Sir Michael 

 Foster, " goes on to ridicule the v-iews held by these 

 philosophers, namely, that a front ventricle is the 

 receptacle of sensations which, passed on to a second 

 ventricle in the middle of the head, are there used for 



imagination, reasoning and thought, and that a third 

 ventricle near the back of the head is devoted to 

 memory." Shakespeare adopts the unscientific termin- 

 ology of the pre-Renaissance writers in the matter of 

 mental states related to cerebral ventricles. 



The expression " nourished in the womb of pia 

 mater" is certainly obscure. "Pia mater" is the 

 name given by anatomists to the highly vascular, soft 

 membrane which, closely investing the brain and central 

 nervous system, conveys to it the nourishing blood- 

 vessels. It does in a sense nourish the brain, and, 

 therefore, metaphorically- might be said to bring to 

 development anything functionally related to the acti- 

 vity of the brain. Whether or not Shakespeare knew 

 of the anatomy of this membrane it is impossible to 

 determine ; but assuming that ideas are " begot " in a 

 cerebral ventricle, it would be permissible to continue 

 the simile and regard them as nourished by the 

 membrane that nourishes the organ of thought. The 

 completion of the analogy between giving birth to a 

 child and bringing forth a thought is, of course, thus 

 made possible. The passage is very striking, and shows 

 Shakespeare familiar at least with the anatomical 

 terminology of his day. 



The allusions in Shakespeare's writings to the activ- 

 ities, both normal and morbid, of the central nervous 

 system are quite as interesting as those relating to the 

 heart and blood-vessels. The symptom of giddiness 

 is mentioned several times in the plays. 



In King John (Act IV, Sc. 2), for instance, we have the 

 line — 



" Thou hast made me giddy with these ill tidings." 



Sudden violent emotion is very liable to produce 

 giddiness ; but few persons e.xcept those trained in 

 physiology could explain exactly how this is so. The 

 emotion, usually of an unpleasant kind, arises on its 

 physical side as an excitement of certain cells of the 

 cortex cerebri ; these cells discharge impulses to the 

 nerves of the heart which have the effect of making the 

 heart-beats ineffective (inhibiting them) for driving 

 enough blood to the brain and central nervous system. 

 The result of this is a general lowering of blood-pressure, 

 so that the cells of the central nervous system, whose 

 duty it is to innervate the muscles engaged in balancing 

 the body, do not now get sufficient blood. The body, 

 therefore, sways and tends to fall, and the subjective 

 sensation accompanying this disturbance of equilibrium 

 is a feeling of giddiness. Cerebral anaemia, in short, 

 produces giddiness. It also produces loss of function 

 in the cerebral sensory centres, and chiefly in the centre 

 for vision, so that the person affected suffers from im- 

 perfect sight. This is interestingly noted in Henry IV 

 (Part II, Act IV, Sc. 4), where King Henry says : 



" And now my sight fails and my brain is giddy " — 



